I have always sold stuff, online since 1999, but there is a polaroid pic of me somewhere from 1991 when I was 4 sitting outside in the dead of winter in my snow suit with a table of wares, a broom and sign that read “Leo’s store.” Some of you may know that I started selling seriously when my mom got sick with pancreatic cancer when I was 10. eBay for me has always been more than a hobby, it was my livelihood and sometimes (a lot of times) my only means of subsistence. Without eBay I wouldn’t have graduated high school, I wouldn’t have gone to college and I wouldn’t be here today.

In college I would spend my weekend packing up eBay items to ship, in sophomore year I got caught in the custodial closet in my dorm and had to go talk to the dean because I had a massive box of unarticulated 1970’s GI Joe dolls sitting in the soap filled sink that I was cleaning and reassembling (they thought I was just a psycho).

The dean couldn’t understand why I was so mad he took the dolls away, and I didn’t understand how he couldn’t realize that the dolls were worth mad money and $2,000 more if they were clean and assembled. I explained to him that the only way I could continue going to “his” college was if I got the dolls back (which he eventually gave me).

it was from this attachment to online income that I decided to create the Gmargin Blog, to show others (maybe those in a similar situation to the one I was in) how to make money online.

I launched the Gmargin blog on October 1, 2013. I made a promise to my friends and family that if I wasn’t able to get 100 people interested in the site by Jan. 1, 2014 I would scrap the site and move on to greener pastures.

I sort of made my goal and as a result have decided to keep up with the site, although I knew in mid-december that I wanted to keep going with it. In fact I have set a goal of turning $0 into $100,000 in 2014 by flipping items on eBay and Craigslist.

The blog had a hard time getting off the ground. Five website visitors pre-launch in the month of September, and 12 visitors in October really put a damper on my enthusiasm, so much so I considered quitting right then and there…fact is I don’t really know much about bringing traffic to a blog, I know how to make money online, I can sell on eBay like a crazy man, but when it comes to starting up and just writing a blog without an audience I found out that I sort of suck at it. Unless I know for a fact that what I am writing is going out there and helping someone, I have a hell of a time writing it.

The site started slow, dead slow, 4 subs that I knew personally (you know who you are), then one day in mid-November a Redditor e-mailed me furious that the eBook he had subscribed to on my site hadn’t been delivered…I was thrilled, seriously, my very first person who actually wanted to hear what I had to say! That said, I had failed him, and it was a kick in the ass that I needed to work harder on the site (I had real people (person) now).

I ended November with 11 subscribers, I wrote an article in response to a somewhat ambiguous NewYorker article which got me about 1400 visitors and I was off.

Today, 1-2-14, I have about 106 people to thank, my subscribers, my audience and my support structure. Almost all of you have come from Reddit, so I particularly want to thank the mods at the sub-reddit /r/flipping for their support. I am going to turn this blog into something that I hope all of you can be inspired by, learn from, use and give to. You are my community, my friends and my teachers. For the first time in my life I have people I can talk to about my passion; earning income online.

You make this all worthwhile, your comments on my site and on Reddit mean the world to me, I promise to put my heart, soul and every ounce of my experience and intellect into making this site the most useful it can possibly be.